IT'S WEEPING'S WORLD: EAT IT!
RESONATOR #1
An Introduction To The Resonator Series:
One of my biggest goals for this year was building community, in the physical neighborhood I live in and the online spaces where my writing lives. Like closed mouths with food, crossed arms that don’t open themselves up to others will not receive others. I wanted to bridge the gap between creating and communicating in a way that mattered – and what matters to me are other artists and words, both of which carry the power of resonation.
Resonation (verb): to have particular meaning or importance to someone. To evoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief. To exhibit or produce resonance or resonant effects.
More than just my creative ethos, this is the feeling that leaves me all tingling and starstruck when I find a work that speaks to me without speaking. From books to songs sung by angry women, I’ve discovered all that resonates with me; all that gives me the fortitude to write prose (and occasionally poetry) to ignite these same flames. I call these artists “Resonators”, which are not “devices or systems that increase the resonance of a sound, especially a hollow part of a musical instrument.” They are the ones with teeth. They have verve. They walk into a silent room and scream. They know the future is a shapeshifter. They watch the world and do something with what they’ve seen. They do not seek to conform or appeal to the masses; rather, they write and sing and paint and sew and make whatever the fuck they want without the masses in mind. The power of resonation is born out of their art. I want to explicate this birth to encourage you to create more art.
This will be an interview series of artists I believe are Resonators, which I hope to continue throughout this year and many more. If you’re a writer/creative human who believes they might *resonate* with my little corner of the internet, message me!
I can’t wait to share with you the incredible talents I’ve discovered over the years. Thank you for reading xx
- We are born out of nothing to create everything. -
Two women wielding swords walk into a bar. One notices the other, the other notices the one. They each grab their hilts and raise their swords in the air. The music stops and people stare.
Everyone waits for violence. The women tilt the swords towards each other until the points touch.
Then the women smile and laugh. They place their swords back in their scabbards and order two cosmopolitans. At the bar, they sit for hours, knowing what they saw in each other was not violence, but understanding.
When I first discovered the music artist Weeping on Instagram, this is how I felt – like I had discovered a woman who carried the same artistic weapon as me. Under the magical tab known as Reels, a video of hers appeared with a sound I couldn’t ignore. Clips of iconic horror movies, such as The Shining, were stitched with the back of a brunette woman in a white skirt. Flashes of each appeared on beat to a deep bass with an uncanny voice, singing, “At the function with a heavy heart.” I didn’t know it, then, but I had just arrived at Weeping's function of artistic vengeance, emblazoned with red velvet and serpent imagery. My heart was anything but heavy.
Following the lead of the Dieric Bouts painting in her profile picture, I scrolled through her page and watched every video, each hidden behind a cover of dark renaissance paintings: Ghismunda squeezing the heart of man over a gold bowl; Desdemona’s deathly slumber; Saint Peter Martyr Exorcizing a Woman Possessed by a Devil; The Fallen Angel; a serpent; a blade; an offering of blood. Maroon(ed women) were everywhere. The visual aesthetic of Weeping paired with her haunting melodies bespoke of a raw emotive quality within the artist and the work. As someone who can’t escape from their own rage most days, her music snippets held me in the same kind of iron grip. I wanted to stay in this anger. I wanted to weep. But don’t take my word for it – take hers.
“I’m a big baby.” Weeping’s first confession came over a Zoom call I had emailed her to set up, where I (bundled in several blankets in my basement office) bore witness to the physical mysteries of her identity becoming unveiled. Sipping tea in an amber-lit coffee shop with brunette hair and a white t-shirt, her aura was that of a lightness I didn’t expect from an artist of the dark. Within our first five minutes of talking about the recent snowfall, how our weeks had been, and who the hell we were, I learned two consequential things about Weeping: the duality of sun and shade lived within her well, and she was originally from Atlanta.
She told me of her journey to Nashville, where she came to study studio engineering. She wanted the world of music to be hers, professionally. “But I became…disillusioned with the music industry.” She looked away from the camera for a moment, fingering her wired headphones as she searched for the right word to describe her career revelations. “I felt like there was too much pressure. Like, too much of the same thing happening all around me. It makes it hard for your craft to happen.”
And when the craft of choice is in a male-dominated field, being a woman is another hindrance to the artist’s ability to create. “As a woman, it can be harrowing.” Weeping sipped her tea. The bright lights and high pressure to succeed in Nashville led her to write songs “with no direction” while working retail. Into the void she went – us creatives know the depths of it well – but out of the void she came. It wasn’t the endless scanning of price tags that pushed her out of this period of silence, though. “The record came back into my life when everything else went to waste.” She laughed, softly.
I knew the karmic cycle she was referring to well. The corner of the room life shoves you into begins to look like a blank canvas after a while. This was how I completed my senior capstone during one of the worst semesters of my life. This was how Weeping began to make music again after a messy ending to a relationship. Through her weeping, Weeping was born.
So who the fuck is Weeping?
Weeping is the singer, producer, multi-instrumentalist and creative director behind a thrilling new feminist undertaking of the electronic/mystical pop genre. She is ruby cowboy boots dancing across a Nashville studio. She is a moonlit soirée; black lace torn to shreds; an A24 horror film you can’t look away from. “I’m a huge horror nerd. Horror movies have a big impact on my music. Especially my song “‘Dance The Axe.’”
The snippets of her lead single “Dance The Axe” (coming this Spring, so get f**king ready!!) possess listeners with an omniscient, almost darkly romantic undertone, which she likens to artists such as Depeche Mode. I confessed to her how her music embodied, to me, “Don’t Fuck With Her” energy. I asked, “How would you describe your music and the inspiration beneath it?”
W: “Haha, I love that! I think ‘Dance The Axe’ is the epitome of Don’t Fuck With Her. Outside of horror visuals and film scores, I draw a lot of my inspiration from life itself. Life is very raw, very ugly. I wanted my music to reflect that, with the color and intensity of a psych-thriller, or straight-up horror film: I wanted to depict how my grief made me feel like I was actually starting to lose it.”
A: “Making art from your pain. And lots of red. I’m here for it.”
W: “Yes! Exactly. I love the idea of familiar visuals and familiar plots…and making something new out of them. I love the Gone Girl archetype, The Shining, women lashing out. I loved what Sabrina Carpenter did with the music video for ‘Taste.’ It was cool seeing how horror films could influence music.”
A: “I feel the same with writing. It’s so funny that you mentioned Gone Girl, because that’s one of my favorite movies of all time and I always rewatch it when I hit a creative block. I’m really fascinated by the layers of references and influences from other mediums in your art. Can you talk about what music you listened to when creating your debut record and how these sources of inspiration led you to here?”
W: “Honestly, this record has been stagnant for a while. I had to live a lot of life in order for this record to happen. But I realized that this was the time to bring it to life. I became possessed with the idea of creating something out of my grief. I wrote an essay on what this record means to me and why I wanted to create it in the first place, just for me and my team to have…it’s like a love letter to the music that got me through that time of feeling so much, so darkly and so deeply.”
A: “Like your own manifesto!”
W: “Yeah, exactly! It’s so long, but I really wanted to flesh everything out. As for the music that helped me get to this phase of my life, I have to start with Radiohead. Hail To The Thief and The King of Limbs. 10/10 albums. Very emo. This past summer, though, for me, was Brat summer. Lots of Brat energy. Very, ‘This is my world. Eat it.’”
A: “Absolutely. Eat. It.”
W: “Hozier’s Unreal Unearth has been another huge inspiration for my record…And Florence + The Machine! I cut my teeth on the Lungs record.”
A catharsis of sharpened fangs and women of the wild gave way to the girl and her sorrow becoming Weeping and her rage. Like those before her, she allowed each strike of life’s hammer to manipulate the malleable shape of who she was in service of her art.
A: “What three words would you use to describe your music style?”
W: “Hmm. I would say Ethereal, Orchestral, and Vulnerable.”
A: “And what would you say your artist ethos is?”
W: “That’s a really good question. My artist ethos…” She looked towards the sky again, the silver adorning her ears and fingers flashing in the coffee shop light. Then her brown eyes returned to the screen with an answer. “I am that I am. For me it’s a way to reconcile with my journey of identity and discovering who I am. How knowing everything wrong made everything right. It’s about artistic autonomy.”
A: “That’s very reminiscent of the whole ‘To be a woman is to perform’ thesis. You seem to be breaking out of this performance through performance.”
W: “Oh my gosh, it’s everywhere. Women have to perform all the time, and I just feel like…like this record is allowing me to perform for myself and what I want to see myself become instead of what others want to see.”
A: “Speaking of what you want to see, do you think you want to see yourself in a music video anytime soon? I know I do.”
W: “This is definitely something I’ve thought about. You know, I have that cinematic side…I’ve worked on film sets in L.A. and I just really love the process of making a video come to life. I just have so many ideas and trying to convey [all of them] into a video can be daunting.”
A: “Are there specific films you would want to emulate in a video of your own? I know how important movies are to you.”
W: “Well, I already mentioned how much I love The Shining, but I’m also obsessed with Poor Things. These are like my two polarities. The soundtrack for these films are insane. I include a lot of atonal strings like they do. Hereditary is another favorite of mine.”
A: “That scene in the car…oh my god!”
W: “The entire score is incredible! It’s oppressive - that’s what I love about it. It holds you in a mood and does not let you go…and that’s what I want for my music, for my record.”
While it’s oppression she seeks, it’s liberation she sonically creates. In just a few months, she’s helped one woman learn to unearth the repressed and ugly parts of herself — and fucking make something out of it. What would she be able to do in a year?
A: “What would you want to say you accomplished one year from today?”
W: “One year from today? Wow…I think a lot of people, especially artists, get caught up in the big, impossible dreams. Honestly, it would be really cool to say that I supported local artists here [in Nashville]. There’s so many talented people here. Having duets with fellow artists would be really fun. I want to grow within this South-East niche, play smaller venues. The small dream of it all. But really, who knows?”
A: “You said your lead single ‘Dance The Axe’ is coming out this Spring. How are you going to feel once this launches?”
W: “Terrified! I’ve always been daunted by the prospect of sharing my craft with the world…But I also feel like the truest version of myself. I feel creatively grounded in my craft. I do these morning pages with this book...it’s called something with artist in the title. The Journey of The Artist maybe?”
I reached across my desk and grabbed my copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I held it up.
A: “This one, right?”
W: “Ahh, yes! Doing the morning pages from that book has really helped me authentically reconnect with my dormant artist…We really do have a lot in common.”
The swords, the bar.
A: “I can’t wait to see what all these pages have come to.”
W: “The debut record NASHVILLE IS HAUNTED, COME HOME TO MY HEART comes out October 1st. It’s time.”
It is. For other small communities of creatives to discover all that Weeping is and will be. Weeping is freedom. Weeping is deliverance. Weeping is taking the axe to the glass ceiling. Weeping is weeping, at the function and everywhere else.
♡THANK YOU FOR READING♡